Baghdad : ‘Ethnically cleansed neighborhoods’ lead to less violence
The Carpetbagger Report
For reasons that I haven’t been able to fully grasp, it’s one of the aspects of recent events in Iraq that seems to be left out of the broader debate. It’s certainly encouraging when we see evidence of a decline in sectarian violence, but when war supporters boast about the results, they seem to miss the point. The results aren’t evidence of a successful “surge,” they’re evidence of a successful cleansing campaign. The Government Accountability Office’s Joe Christoff touched on this yesterday before the House Appropriations Committee. “I think that’s [ethnic cleansing] an important consideration in even assessing the overall security situation in Iraq. You know, we look at the attack data going down, but it’s not taking into consideration that there might be fewer attacks because you have ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, particularly in the Baghdad area.” As TP noted, ret. Gen. James Jones said the same thing last month, noting unfortunate “progress” in a Shi’a-led ethnic cleansing campaign (…) As McClatchy recently reported, military officers believe drops in sectarian attacks “may be an indication that ethnic cleansing has been completed in many neighborhoods and that there aren’t as many people to kill.”…

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Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Iraq Raiding Mosques, Torturing Iraqis
Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books
The following excerpt is from chapter 9 of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Iraq by Dahr Jamail (Haymarket, 2007). (…)
In an April 13 prime-time press conference addressing the ongoing violence in Iraq, George W. Bush told reporters, “America’s armed forces are performing brilliantly, with all the skill and honor we expect of them.” He went on to say that he knew what the United States was doing in Iraq was right.When I read this in Baghdad, I wondered if Bush included the massacre of unarmed women, children, and elderly in Fallujah? When he said he believed the soldiers in Iraq were performing brilliantly “with all the skill and honor…” did this include the snipers shooting ambulances with blaring sirens and flashing lights? Did this include dragging an entire country into a bloody chaos that was worsening by the hour? My sources from inside Fallujah, many of whom were doctors, said that by now more than six hundred bodies had been counted at area emergency facilities, although the local medical authorities in the city believed that a significant number of victims had been buried without any possibility of receiving care at a clinic or hospital. Mass funerals were being conducted during brief lulls in the fighting. One of the two soccer fields in the town had been converted into a mass martyr cemetery….

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Surmounting Sectarianism in the Middle East:
As’ad al-Azzouni, “Monthly Review”
In a recent interview with the Qatari daily al-Raya, the Jordanian Marxist writer and activist Hisham Bustani analyses current issues: the situation in the Arab region; threats against Iran; the “Broader Middle East Initiative”; the U.S., Arab regimes, and Islamists; and prospects of the Arab liberation project. This interview, conducted by the journalist As’ad al-Azzouni, clarifies the internal processes of subjection and their connection with external processes. It also sheds light on positions of Arab progressives and how they perceive their objective reality and future. Bustani emphasizes the need for Left unity in building a pan-Arab, de-sectarianized movement of principled resistance to imperialism…

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Orders from the top
Dunlavey: Guantanamo mission came straight from Bush, Rumsfeld
Lisa Thompson
When military investigators questioned Erie County Judge Michael E. Dunlavey about reported prisoner abuse during his tenure at the Guantanamo Bay camp for suspected terrorists, Dunlavey told them he got his “marching orders” from President Bush, according to a new book about U.S. policies regarding torture. The book, “Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond,” relies on government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act to trace the development of what the authors claim was prisoner abuse and torture that emerged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The book uses Dunlavey’s words to place him, a retired two-star general in the U.S. Army Reserve, at the advent of the development of what have become disputed interrogation policies….

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WHAT THE MEDIA DOESN’T TELL YOU ABOUT TORTURE
Desert Peace
What responsibility do Bush administration lawyers bear for torture? That provocative and important question will be examined by Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence R. Velvel and Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights(CCR) on Monday, November 5, at 9:30 a.m., on”What the Media Doesn’t Tell you,” aired on the World Radio Network’s European and North American affiliates. Velvel produces and hosts the broadcast, during which he discusses with experts issues the mainstream mass media fails to cover adequately, if at all, and their implications for American democracy…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 2 November 2007
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
…In a dispatch posted at 9:46pm Baghdad time Friday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a US helicopter gunship attacked residential houses in southern Baghdad, killing 10 people, including women and children. Correspondent Mus’ab ‘Abdallah of Yaqen reported that photographs showed women and children wrapped in US military body bags and yellow bloodstained blankets. Other children were seen wrapped in Iraqi flags with black-clad women weeping over them. One woman asked through tears: “Are these terrorists? Are these gunmen? These are children. Why do they rocket homes and peaceful people? This is a ridiculous policy!” Another local resident told Yaqen, the aircraft carried out a military operation in the Salman Bak neighborhood to the south of Baghdad late this evening.” Iraqis complain that many US air strikes against “suspects” kill and wound civilians….

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Russia raps Saudi atomic fuel proposal for Iran: RIA
Reuters
Russia’s nuclear chief on Friday said only full nuclear powers should create centers for enriching uranium, in a swipe at a Saudi proposal for Arab states to help supply Iran with enriched uranium. U.S.-allied Gulf Arab states are ready to set up a body to provide enriched uranium to Iran in a bid to defuse Tehran’s stand-off with the West over its nuclear plan, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister told a magazine this week. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries — Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates — have proposed creating a Middle East consortium for users of enriched uranium, Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED)….

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VA says 6 percent of combat vets have TBIs
Rick Maze – Staff writer
About 6 percent of Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans seeking treatment at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries, according to preliminary data released Friday. A VA mandatory screening program that took effect in April has looked at 61,285 veterans of the wars. Of those, 19.2 percent were identified on the screening questionnaire as potentially suffering from traumatic brain injuries and were referred for more tests….

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‘USAF struck Syrian nuclear site’
JPOST.COM STAFF
The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a suspected nuclear site under construction. The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes…

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Bush broke promises to Turkey, says former envoy
Warren P Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers
The retired general who served as George Bush’s special envoy to deal with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) today said the US has failed to keep its promises to Turkey to confront the Kurdish group. Retired air force General Joseph Ralston declined to say why he stepped down several weeks ago. But published reports have said that he was frustrated by the Bush administration’s failure to act against the PKK. He said Turkey may feel that it has no choice but to attack the PKK in northern Iraq…

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Rice, Others to be Supoenaed in AIPAC Spy Case
Associated Press
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and more than a dozen other current and former intelligence officials must testify about their conversations with pro-Israel lobbyists, a federal judge ruled Friday in an espionage case. Lawyers for two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists facing charges have subpoenaed Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and several others to testify at their trial next year. Prosecutors had challenged the subpoenas in federal court….

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Caged & Lonely…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
…Iraq the model of American/Western democracy. In Iraq, you smell putrefied, decomposing bodies daily, it has become part of the National “flavor.” So have abandonment and neglect – our new national emblems. And loneliness a by-product of our Liberation “à l’0ccidentale.” You have managed to export not only, your “freedom” with its death, exile and misery. Not only your puritanical, perverted sexual repressions finding release- Abu Ghraib style. Not only your men and weapons that guarantee instant rapture. Not only your culture that consists of nothing but junk. But you have also managed to export your soul sickness over here…Loneliness. “Dozens of Baghdadis flock to the centre of the Iraqi capital on Friday mornings, ignoring the threat to their lives, with a sole aim — to ease their loneliness in the company of a bird. Their destination is not a cinema, theatre or concert hall — a rarity in the Iraqi capital — but central Baghdad’s Al-Ghazl bird market Fuad is one of them. “I do not go out of my home. Because of the dangers, I prefer to stay at home rather than seek work. So I decided to buy a parrot who can entertain me,” says Fuad, an unemployed graduate.<(…) Ironic don’t you think ? Here is a people unable to venture out, unable to enjoy the fruits of “their liberation,” unable to taste the “culture of democracy,” unable to have a normal life like any other people. So they go and risk their lives, and head to a pet market. Braving it all, to buy a bird to entertain them ! and ease their loneliness. A caged people seeking a caged bird to give them the illusion of Freedom. How terribly sad. How terribly criminal…

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Palestinian Corpses Computer Screen Graphics
ISRAELI PHOTO – EXCHANGE
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
Trading photos on their cell phones manifesting their morbid hatred and envy against Palestinians they have murdered on the Gaza Strip, is the new hobby among Israeli Zionist state terrorists. Photo-captures of Palestinian corpses used as screen savers by the Israeli Jews is nothing new – I have heard this unbelivable true story before.The Israelis in their morbid interest in Palestinian pain and death, found a new amusement in swapping photos taken with their cellphones during their missions of murder on the Gaza Strip…

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Israeli court demands money from child of a killed Palestinian fighter
Ali Samoudi – IMEMC
The family of a Palestinian fighter killed by the Israeli army were this week shocked to receive an Israeli court order demanding the child of the fighter pay for the cost of transporting the body. Farah Yasseen, 7, the daughter of Mustafa Yasseen, received the order that she has to pay 1850 NIS, about 400 USD for the cost of the Israeli ambulance that transported the body of her father from the Israeli hospital back to the family house in Aneen village, located near the northern West Bank city of Jenin. In July 2002, the Israeli army invaded the village of Aneen, surrounded the house of Yasseen and killed him before taking the body to an Israeli hospital….

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Thursday, 1 November 2007.
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. www.freearabvoice.org
….In a dispatch posted at 12:51pm Baghdad time Thursday afternoon, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq (AMSI) reported that US troops opened fire on school teacher Ibrahim al-’Azzawi as he was driving his car to work in the village of al-Bu Jalli near Yathrib, about 80km north of Baghdad on Thursday morning. The AMSI reported a source in the puppet police as saying that al-’Azzawi and two of his sons who were in the car with him at the time were all killed in the American attack. As of the time of reporting, the American forces had made no comment on deaths of their latest civilian victims…

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US attorney general nominee refuses to condemn torture techniques
Joe Kay, WSWS
The Bush administration’s nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, refused on Tuesday to declare that waterboarding and other torture techniques are illegal. He also repeated a series of positions undermining basic democratic rights on questions of detention, domestic spying and presidential power. Mukasey’s statements came in the form of written responses to questions submitted by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is currently considering the nomination. Several of the questions from Democratic Senators focused on interrogation techniques reportedly used by the CIA. Among these is waterboarding, which involves strapping a prisoner to a board, covering his face with cloth, and pouring water over it to induce the fear of drowning….

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Building of Iraqi police barracks threatens world heritage site
Michael Howard, The Guardian
The construction of a large police barracks close to the Great Mosque of Samarra and its famed spiral minaret is imperilling another of Iraq’s precious historical sites, Unesco and senior archaeologists have warned. Work on the building and a training centre for 1,500 Iraqi policemen is continuing in Samarra, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, despite the addition this summer of the ninth-century remains of the capital of the Abbasid dynasty to Unesco’s list of endangered world heritage sites. There are fears that the police compound will prove an irresistible target for insurgents, and that the construction and operation of the barracks will damage the Samarra Archaeological City, one of the country’s largest and most valuable historical areas, the Art Newspaper reported in its November issue….

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“This is Really How They Feel”
They Met the Resistance in Iraq
MIKE FERNER
On one of those beautiful, fall Sunday mornings that can make you feel all is right with the world, filmmakers Molly Bingham and Steve Connors discussed their new documentary about Iraqis fighting the U.S. occupation, Meeting Resistance, 84 minutes of unflinching wallop destined to unhinge the way millions of Americans see their country’s role in the world….

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Iraq’s little-known humanitarian crisis
Haroon Siddiqui
It is said that Iraq is the world’s best-known conflict but the least well-known humanitarian crisis. In the United States, where public attention span is low but the capacity for denial high, Iraq’s daily carnage no longer commands headlines. American public discourse long ago shifted to the domestic political implications of Iraq for George W. Bush et al. Those who do think of Iraq think mostly of the murderous sectarianism of the Sunnis and Shiites. If Muslims are killing each other, there’s not much America can do, Iraq being another Yugoslavia – once the iron grip of Saddam Hussein or Josip Tito was gone, all the old animosities re-emerged. But in Iraq, there was no such suppressed hatred. Shiites and Sunnis had always lived in harmony. Inter-marriage was common. The more apt parallel is with the 1947 partition of British India that precipitated a mass migration and a massacre among Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs who had lived in harmony for centuries…

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Diaspora Palestinians to Abbas: Right of return not negotiable
Palestinian National Voice, The Electronic Intifada
…While Palestinians still suffer from the disaster of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian National Authority has now agreed to attend another round of flawed negotiations. This time it does so under the pressure of North American and European nations that have actively collaborated with Israel to divide the Palestinian people and inflict collective punishment and other war crimes against them. Even now Israel is being allowed to deny the Palestinians the basic necessities for a functioning society through a humiliating siege against the Palestinian people in response to the exercise of Palestinian democracy and the adherence to its results…

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‘Link Iraq to Iran,’ Rumsfeld argued before proof
Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Ten months before the US aired formal proof of Iranian involvement in funding Iraqi insurgents, then-Secretary of Defense warned in secret Pentagon memos that Iran should be the “concern of the American people” and he issued explicit instructions to the military. “[L]ink Iraq to Iran,” Rumsfeld wrote in one of thousands of “snowflakes” — short memos distributed throughout the Pentagon during his tenure….

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Saudi offers deal to end Iran nuclear stand-off
Richard Beeston, TimesOnline
Saudi Arabia today revealed details of an ambitious offer to Tehran, aimed at defusing the growing crisis over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme. Speaking at the end of the state visit to London by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, his Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that every effort must be made to avert what many fear could turn into a military confrontation between the United States and Iran…

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About that map
Arablinks
One of the institutes run by the Hakim (SIIC) family has been distributing in the province of Karbala a map showing a three-part federal division of Iraq, with two (not three) hands clasped over by the Iranian border, and rays emanating from there to the Kurdish region in the north and the “region of the center and the south” in the south. Abu Aardvark dug this up (via jihadi forums and Haq agency, who said they found it on a international resistance website called Qawm), and you can see the image there. One of his commenters notes that the Sunni region in the west looks like Mordor, which is true, it does. There is something particularly odd that contributes to that. The Southwest portion of Anbar province has been lopped off from Anbar and assigned to Karbala province. And Haq says the member of parliament who first publicized this map called attention to that, and said the reason was to eliminate any common border between Anbar province and Saudi Arabia….

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Thursday: 3 GIs, 58 Iraqis Killed; 45 Iraqis Wounded
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
At least 58 Iraqis were killed and 45 more were wounded during a series a bombings in the capital and elsewhere. Also, three American servicemembers were killed in separate events. Two GIs were killed and two more were wounded during an explosion in Ninewah province. Another soldier was killed in a separate explosion in Salah ad Din province. A truck bomb targeting an army base in Saadiya killed five and wounded 18 others, including soldiers. Another explosion, as well as a suicide bomber, was reported…

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